Reading: The Scriptural Theory of Reality and the Cappadocian Fathers

What I'm going to do today is to begin to sketch an alternative theory of reality, a theory of reality that I think accords better with the biblical idea of God. By that, I mean the idea of God as portrayed in the pages of Scripture, rather than thinking of God as identical with all the perfections, the way Augustine proposed.

I'm picking on him as the example of the most influential person to hold that view. It didn't start with him, and it certainly didn't end with him, but he's one of the great champions of that view. Let's remind ourselves what we're talking about. We're discussing the views held by the likes of Augustine, St. Anselm, who was Archbishop of Canterbury, and St. Thomas Aquinas. The three great champions of this view. So, I call it the AAA view of God. This view posits that God is the being with all perfections, and only perfections.

I want to revisit a point I made earlier. The real mischief in this formula is the part that says he has only perfections. Why corner oneself with such a notion? Why can't God have all the perfections and then relate to people in ways that are less than perfect? He has related to people imperfectly. For instance, when I pray to God, he gets prayed to by me. Is that a perfection? No. But why should it have to be? Yet, this perspective insists that God is this pure form with only perfections.

This thinking leads almost immediately, in both Augustine and Aquinas, to assert the simplicity of God. Simplicity means that there's only one God and, thus, only one perfection. This single perfection encapsulates infinite justice, goodness, love, beauty, power, and knowledge. All that we view as individual perfections is fused into one entity in God.

There's an accompanying assumption: anything true of God must be uncreated and eternal because God himself is uncreated and eternal. I find this problematic. For instance, when I pray to God, he gains the property of being prayed to by me. That's neither uncreated nor eternal. Why can't it be true of God? Why can't he relate to creatures in ways that aren't eternal perfections? In fact, Scripture often speaks of God in terms that aren't about eternal perfections. It talks about him changing his mind, arguing with people, expressing anger, praising the faithful, and caring for the sick and poor.

Taking the view that God has only eternal perfections, you risk negating much of what Scripture says about God, including essential aspects like God's forgiveness and his covenant promise of everlasting life. Remember, Augustine proposed the idea of simplicity for a valid reason. He didn't want God to be dependent on existing perfections to be God. Augustine's solution was that these perfections are God, and God doesn't have them separate from his being. Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas also believed that the laws of math, logic, and rationality are embedded in God, making them changeless and necessarily true.

However, when we reflect on Scripture's portrayal of God, we see a stark contrast to the views of Augustine and Aquinas. For instance, God is depicted as a friend, such as to Abraham and David. He's shown to express emotions, change his mind, and interact in dynamic ways with humans.

Moreover, the Bible doesn't delve deeply into how God possesses his characteristics, but there's a notable exception in Proverbs chapter eight. Here, wisdom, personified, speaks of being created by God, which contradicts the perspectives of Augustine and Aquinas. They could never assert that God created wisdom and then used it to shape the heavens and earth.

For them, it's an eternal perfection. God can't help but have that's precisely what Proverbs eight denies.

Now, there is in Christianity a very crucial and important doctrine that Anselm Augustine, Aquinas, all affirm and I do too, we all agree, is taught by Scripture. That doctrine is called the doctrine of the Incarnation. That means that God came, incarnated Himself and came to earth, in the person of Jesus Christ, to fulfill the covenant requirements and redeem all of humankind, plus the entire cosmos. This has been expressed by theologians over the years, including Aquinas and Augustine, by saying that God took our humanity into himself. One of the Creeds says, in the incarnation, it is not that our humanity became divine, but that the divine took our humanity into itself.

Why isn't that a more sensible way to understand how God possesses his attributes? It means that wisdom, mercy, love, and justice were all created by God. But he took them into himself. Instead of incarnation, let's call it increased duration. These are creatures, that is, they're created things like mercy, love, justice, truth, power, and wisdom. And God created them and took them into himself, even prior to creating the rest of creation, even prior to the heavens and the earth. By saying that God created them doesn't mean there was ever a time God didn't have them. God did this eternally. Rather than say, "he is them", there's a difference between God and His attributes. It's not the case that he is them, or Proverbs eight couldn't say that his wisdom was created by him.

Why not follow the example of the doctrine of the Incarnation? God took them into himself the way he took the entire person of Jesus Christ into himself. And that is how they come to be true of God. He did that eternally. He always was and always will be. He promises us he'll never change or go back on his covenantal word. Why isn't that the way to think of how God possesses his attributes?

Scripture goes on and speaks in other ways that fit with us very well. For example, we're told any number of times that God created time, that's a feature of the created universe. God's own existence is independent of time. Hebrews, in the New Testament, says, "through Christ, God created the ages of time". And other places in the Testament talk about his plan for believers from before the ages of time.

But God has a presence in time. No, it's not the case that God is a temporal and nothing about him can touch or be sullied by time. He is in himself non-temporal, but can create a presence of himself in time if he wishes. Did not God act in time? Did not God send, at the proper time, his own son to become incarnate? Will his own son not return to Earth at the proper time? Sure. God created space. There's even a scripture text that explicitly says that in Romans eight, heights and depths are creatures. God's own existence is independent of space. He doesn't need space to exist any more than he needs time to exist. But he has a presence in time. "Where shall I go from my spirit?" the psalmist says, "If I go to the farthest reaches of the universe, you are there. If I go to the depths of hell, you are there." God has a presence everywhere in space.

God has created mercy and justice, but he himself is merciful and just. God created a world in which there's quantity. That's how we got our number series. We do math. But God has taken into himself being one God in three persons. That's what it means for the father to beget the Son and the Spirit to proceed from the Father.

There was another way to deal with all this stuff. But Augustine went down a different road. And then Anselm and Aquinas followed, and they are three very gifted thinkers. Very impressive and persuasive to read. And they set Western Christianity off, I say, on the wrong course. The alternative that I've been laying out for you, sketching a little bit and pointing to, says, God could have created these things and taken them into himself. He did it so eternally. He's always been this way and always will be. That doesn't change. But it's not the case that whatever is true of God has to be uncreated, because what he takes on is created, so we can understand it.

He has accommodated not just the language in which he speaks about himself, but he has first accommodated himself to our understanding. He has properties that exist in the world that we know, that we distinguish, that we conceive of, and that is how we conceive of him. Those are all of his manifestations and effects. It's what other theology calls his energies. His essential being is uncreated, self-existent, being that generates everything else. We have no concept of that because all the laws we use to conceive things were created by Him. The laws of logic and math are not eternal, uncreated; they're creatures. And we can't apply them to God's uncreated being. We do not know that uncreated being at all. We have no concept of that. But we have a concept of every manifestation he gives to us of himself because those are accommodated to us. Those are manifestations in space and time, and they have properties of quantity and qualities of all sorts that we can know.

This alternative view was held, first of all, by the Cappadocian fathers. These are theologians who lived before Augustine. And they are all related to one another, interestingly. First is Basil of Caesarea. Basil was called the Greek, and he was the Bishop of Caesarea. His brother was Gregory of Nyssa. And his brother-in-law was Gregory Nazianzus. And his sister's name was Macrina. And Macrina was the secretary to them all. And none of their works were published until she approved of it. She also contributed to those works. So the Cappadocian fathers aren't all men. One of them's a woman and three men: Basil, his brother, his brother-in-law, and his sister. And they produced a magnificent corpus of work, all having worked out this doctrine of God that I've suggested, this alternative to Augustine, and they did it before Augustine. And not only that, they gave out warnings not to identify God with the perfections a la Plato or other Greek philosophers.

They were very well aware of this. They said the big divide in reality is between God and everything else, which is his creature. It's not between the rational and the sensibly perceivable, the way Plato and Aristotle had it. God isn't one of the rational creatures. God created rationality. God created the laws of logic and mathematics. These are laws that govern creatures.

This is a jolt, right? We are so used to hearing the AAA view of God that when this is first spoken or put into words, and you see something like this, it's like moving the house a foot to the left. Everything gets shaken. But the Eastern Church has always remained faithful to this. There's another great champion of this view, who lived after Augustine, and his name is John Damascene. John Damascene was born in Damascus, lived his whole life in Damascus, and he was a monk in the monastery there, outside of Damascus. John Damascene wrote a book called "An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith." And in that book, he gives this view in great detail, and he points out where Augustine went wrong. And there's a lot of criticism of Augustine in John Damascene. He doesn't hold back.

The Eastern Orthodox Church has never accepted Augustine's doctrine of God. Neither did the Cappadocian fathers. And it seems to me, they've got a better one. They've got a better way to think about this, a better way to explain it, a better way to understand it. And I think this is a very crucial issue. It isn't just a matter of different ways to express the same thing. These are two very different views. And the one that Augustine came up with and sold to the Western Church, it makes it impossible to affirm that God is love. And that, in turn, makes it impossible to affirm that God created out of love. The Cappadocian fathers, John Damascene, and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, as a whole, allow that God is love and created out of love. And that, I submit, is the more biblical view.

So, what do we need to do? We need to learn about the Eastern Church. We need to read John Damascene and the Cappadocian fathers. We need to rethink this whole thing. It's time. We've had 1500 years of the Augustine view, and it's time to rethink it. We should at least give it a fair shake and see how it comes out. And my hunch is, when you do that, you'll be persuaded, as I am, that it's time to make a change. And that's where I would like to end my talk today. Thank you.